A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
What price virtue? An Obama t-shirt available at the Smithsonian American Art Museum for $45:
Across the street in a gift shop run by a Chinese woman with an accent… a $7 Trump T-shirt. Made in Honduras:
Separately, an attorney with whom I work (as a software expert witness, fortunately, not on legal questions!) silently protests the political groupthink at his big firm with a Donald J. Trump Signature Collection tie:
I am an advocate for progressive causes on Facebook, e.g.., posting “Every month is Pride Month for Nantucket canines” over these photos from a dog boutique:
Perhaps for this reason, I am on Joe Biden’s email lists. Yet I hadn’t seen messages from Team Joe, Joe Biden HQ, Joe Biden, or Biden for President until recently.
Why not?
Gmail pushed them into the Spam bin!
What did I miss?
I.e., Biden accuses a popular-with-millions politician from the opposing party of “incredible abuses of power” and then says he will unite the country and not be “divisive”!
How could these righteous messages of Trump hatred, advocacy for victim groups, and promises of healing be blocked as spam?
Full post, including commentsArticle from Newsweek:
Campaign workers for Bernie Sanders have taken aim at one of the senator’s key policies in his 2020 presidential run — raising the federal minimum wage. According to The Washington Post, some members of Sanders’ campaign team have been lobbying to raise their wages so that they make the $15 hourly rate that the Vermont senator has frequently called for both on the campaign trail and in Washington D.C.
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Full post, including commentsReaders: Please take a look at this video of Pete Buttigieg speaking in April 2017 and tell me why this guy isn’t the front runner among Democrats.
Like Barack Obama (whose victory I predicted in December 2007), he makes the challenges that face Americans seem trivial and inexpensive to address.
He’s obviously intelligent. He didn’t sue his spouse and split up his children’s family the way that former divorce plaintiff Elizabeth Warren did. He didn’t have sex with a married 30-years-older politician in order to get ahead (Kamala Harris). Since he currently claims to identify as a gay man, he isn’t likely to be accused of touching women (Joe Biden).
He doesn’t express as much contempt for Republican voters as the rest of the hopefuls, does he? (Atlantic says that he attacks Christians, but actual Christian believers are now rare in the U.S.)
He does claim credit for the success of South Bend, something much more likely attributable to (a) the trend toward urbanization, (b) population growth in the U.S. (all of the immigrants and their kids don’t tend to settle in rural areas), and (c) South Bend being home to a university. But success has many fathers!
Simply based on the above-cited video, I would be happy to vote for this guy from a purely emotional point of view. For how many other Democratic candidates can one say that?
[Separately, what is the risk that people will start referring to this candidate as “Pete Butthead”?]
Full post, including comments… because it doesn’t go far enough!
Economists have found that most of the benefits of subsidized federal student loans went to colleges, which used the money to overpay administrators (how do we know they’re overpaid? look at the quit rate!).
Colleges seem to charge students however much they think a family can cough up. When the Feds added guaranteed and/or subsidized loans, colleges just raised their prices. Students did not receive a better education because they paid more. The extra money was used for more administrative bloat and higher salaries for existing administrators.
Instead of merely forgiving student loans that haven’t yet been paid off, what would be fair is if the government admitted this was a welfare scheme for universities and, in addition to forgiving unpaid loans, refunded all payments made under these ill-advised programs.
Readers: Is it time to admit that the government helped universities fleece American families and give back the stolen money?
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“If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” was a common expression in New York City during my father’s youth (Great Depression and World War II).
I’m wondering if this way of thinking explains why so many Americans who’ve obtained degrees from elite institutions and earn above-median wages are advocates of socialism. On the face of it, it doesn’t seem rational for people who earn 4-5X the median wage to say that income inequality is a national emergency and to be more enthusiastic about socialism than are people who earn below-median wages.
Pre-2016, my neighbors here in Eastern Massachusetts were upset when politicians and bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. would make decisions without consulting them. Since they knew themselves to be the smartest folks on the planet, why wouldn’t President Obama, the Wise One, call them up to ask for advice? Upset turned to rage following the country’s choice of Donald Trump.
What’s even more upsetting than not having one’s desired level of political influence? Not having one’s fair level of financial reward.
In a fair market, someone with a Ph.D. in humanities would get paid more than someone with a high school degree, at least if the Ph.D. in humanities is allowed to define “fair.” Yet an American bond trader with a high school degree can easily earn 10X what a liberal arts professor may earn (100X if we compare to an adjunct!). Thus we come to slightly newer adage: “When the market gives you an answer you don’t like, declare market failure.”
Readers: What do you think? What accounts for people with incomes that are well above the median advocating for “socialism”, which would tend to narrow the income distribution? Could it be rational? As the U.S. population expands and there is a brutal competition for scraps of desirable real estate, for example, will it help the Ph.D. academic to afford a beach house if central planners won’t give the bond trader enough to buy 10 beach houses?
Full post, including commentsI was chatting with the owner of a small public-use (but privately-owned) airport. He’d gotten $3 million in state funding to repave the sub-3000′ runway and a parallel taxiway.
I said “That’s nuts. How do the airparks afford to maintain their runways when they might have only 30 houses?” (It would make a lot more sense to build the hangar homes next to a quiet publicly owned airport that is eligible for federal and state funds, but the regulations around “through-the-fence” access are complex.)
He said, “Oh, if you did it with private money it would be $1 million. When the state runs a project, the costs are a lot higher.”
He went on to explain that he had recently installed a Siemens-manufactured VASI next to the runway (these are the red/white lights that tell pilots whether they are above or below the standard glide slope for landing). With a bit of pitching in by based aircraft owners, the cost was $8,000. A nearby publicly owned airport installed the same Siemens-built equipment with federal money. The cost was $120,000 (15X).
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Full post, including commentsI tend to visit the gym at hours when the only other patrons are less than 5 or over 65. The other day, two Medicare-eligible gentlemen were discussing (in moderately strong Boston accents) the 2020 Presidential campaign.
Readers: Why would voters want to elect Biden? He was born in November 1942 so he’d turn 79 during his first year in office, right? And be 82 when running for reelection?
Full post, including commentsNearly a year ago, the New York Times carried the story of the master spy Maria Butina (post). One photo showed her as a student pilot in a Piper Warrior (market value: $30,000?). Later it turned out that she was planning to move to South Dakota in order to more effectively continuing her spying on the Federal government. Vladimir Putin claimed not to know her (CNBC), exactly as we’d expect if she were a critical Kremlin asset.
Now this from CNN… “How the case against Maria Butina began to crumble”:
Prosecutors, meanwhile, have acknowledged that Butina is no Russian spy. But they insist her crime was still nefarious and that she acted as an “access agent” to help spot people who could be recruited as intelligence assets down the road.
“Butina was not a spy in the traditional sense of trying to gain access to classified information to send back to her home country. She was not a trained intelligence officer,” prosecutors acknowledged in a court filing. But, her actions “had the potential to damage the national security of the United States.”
Maybe next time our counterintelligence agents can be trained to look for spies in turbine-powered aircraft?
[U.S. taxpayers, in addition to paying for the investigation and prosecution, now also get to pay for 18 months of incarceration, Butina’s sentence for failing to register as a foreign lobbyist.]
Related:
My Facebook feed is a good indication of how Democrats aged 40-65 think.
In 2016, these folks yearned to be led by a senior citizen. They would have been happy with Bernie Sanders (77 years old) or Hillary Clinton (71), for example, tottering up the stairs to the White House.
In 2018, they were admiring Stormy Daniels (40) for her bravery and her attorney, Michael Avenatti (48), for his determination and possible Presidential candidacy.
These days, however, they post panegyrics to the wisdom of people young enough to be their children, e.g., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (age 29; “in the media mostly because she’s good-looking,” says an independent friend) and Pete Buttigieg (37).
This seems fickle to me. Google and Facebook don’t change their minds every few years about what age person they want to see in various roles within their companies. Why would passionate Democrats swing wildly between thinking that a senior citizen has the requisite life experience to be their leader and deciding that actually the most sensible choice is to follow the guidance of a 29-year-old?
[More worrisome to me personally: Why the apparent dismissal of those of us in, um, later middle age?]
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